On the other hand, and talking about people who is inmune to their responsabilities, there is the opposite case, people who always feel responsible of everything. I’m interested in why we assume facts that are not our fault and don’t say a word in response.

Interesting post. Thanks.

Good points and I hope other people were shocked out of their complacency!

Best wishes, Matt

Also I strongly feel that our options are limited by what happens to us externally. For example, I spent 9 years living in chronic pain. My choices each day were limited to the choices of other people, but I had choices. I could choose how I was going to react to the situation.

When it comes to choices sometimes the consequences are unthinkable for us but it’s still a choice. Take the situation of a child bride in a chauvinistic culture – her choice is to get married at age 12 or die. That’s still a choice even though it doesn’t feel like one. Life is choice – sometimes incredibly hard ones, the concept of freewill is based in choice.

But this article isn’t aimed at someone in that situation – as I said in the opening sentence, it’s aimed at the culture of “it’s not my fault” that we’ve developed in North America.

I really liked your concise and well constructed piece. There are a few areas I would like to add some, hopefully constructive, comments:

- Life is choice. I agree with this when we talk of the western / developed world where people have education or even the opportunity for education. Take somewhere like Sudan, where there are millions of people hungry, dying of disease or whatever, often many too young to understand – I do not think many of them have a choice. Choice is what we privilged few have and even the luxury of writing on blogs like this discussing the concept of choice. For many choice is a myth (or at least until they have enough education and or opportunity to understand the concept of choice) and I think that those of lucky enough to have choice (even when we refuse to recognise it) could do with bearing this in mind more often.

- Anyone who says “I had no choice” is lying. I know what you are saying but I don’t think that ‘lying’ is the appropriate language here. I think people often refuse to accept that they have a choice and therefore deny its existence, which I think is different to lying, which to me is a purposeful detraction from the truth (conscious or subconscious) of being able to choose a certain direction.

For some reason, in many social situations many English people talk about how ’so and so made me drink’ or ‘I had no choice but to drink that shot’ and I think that the use of language is critical here and likely a reflection of the lack of self esteem for many who refuse to accept that they have a choice in these and many other situations. in fact, I think that your points 1 & 2 are interconnected. With so many people on autopilot and living by the societal rules and systems that have been put in place, they are too tired or bothered or confident enough to recognise that choice is something we face every second of the day.

Anyway, I could go on but alas I hope I have made some interesting comments on a post, which for the main, I enjoyed and thought was well written.

Best wishes, Matt

@Anthony
Yeah, that one I don’t get. Like the burgers were getting shoved down the person’s throat…

- The Mcdonalds incident comes into mind: sue the restaurant for getting overweight.